Ronan Farrow's birthday

American journalist Satchel Ronan O’Sullivan Farrow was born on December 19th, 1987, New York City, as the son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen. An academically talented child, Ronan (the name he prefers to use) skipped ahead in school and attended The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY), a program for gifted children. When he was eleven years old, he enrolled at liberal arts college Bard College at Simon’s Rock, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Ronan later transferred to Bard College, New York, where he earned a BA in philosophy at the age of fifteen. Afterwards, he went to Yale Law School, graduating in 2009.

Starting in 2001, Farrow has occupied a series of jobs in or relating to public service. He served as a UNICEF Spokesperson for Youth until 2009, advocating for children and women and helping raise funds. While in Law School, Farrow worked as an intern at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. He also worked in the office of the chief counsel at the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, with the focus on laws regarding international human rights. In 2009, Ronan became part of the Obama administration, as Special Adviser for Humanitarian and NGO Affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was appointed by the then-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as her Special Adviser for Global Youth Issues in 2011.

In 2012, Farrow left his Special Adviser post and started attending Magdalen College, Oxford as a student under the Rhodes Scholarship program. He completed his thesis in 2018 and earned a DPhil. Between 2014 and 2015, Ronan hosted the Ronan Farrow Daily, a television news program that only lasted one season due to poor ratings. Aside from his news show, Farrow has also written essays and op-eds for various news outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, amongst others. In 2015, Ronan published his first book through Penguin Press, titled Pandora’s Box: How American Military Aid Creates America’s Enemies.

In October 2017, an investigative article written by Farrow was published in magazine The New Yorker. The article contained allegations of sexual misconduct against film producer Harvey Weinstein. For Farrow’s finding and report, The New Yorker was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, shared with Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey from The New York Times, who had also printed an article around the same time with its own investigation. In 2018, Ronan’s second book came out, called War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, followed by Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators in 2019.

In recent years, Farrow has continued to investigate and report on cases of allegations of sexual assault, as well as the matter of singer Britney Spears’ Conservatorship and subsequent legal dispute, which was published in 2021.